My little bruiser …

My one-year-old Elsa is forever bruising her face, once giving herself a deep black shiner on her sister’s book shelf. She falls, trips, leaps and lunges into things constantly, making trips to the playground an exercise in “keeping the baby whole.”

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She looks like this, except with a diaper.

I’m not absolving myself of responsibility for the chronic bruises, I’m just giving context. She is such a handful I wrote, only half-jokingly, in her birthday party “Save the Date”: “Our daredevil daughter is planning a really excellent party trick. I overheard something about a ‘roof’, ‘triple somersault’ and ‘sandbox’.”

Elsa took her first steps at 9 months and by 10 months had developed this chest-out swagger like a Folsom Street bar bouncer. Then the “That-makes-mommy-nervous” stuff began: like “surfing” in her Radio Flyer wagon. And standing on chairs. She was so tiny, I took to calling her “Chucky”: you don’t expect the doll to talk and walk.

I just wasn’t prepared for this. My oldest daughter, Ani, who walked at 14 months, was extremely cautious. For her, the swing was an instrument of terror, the slide a chute into hell.

Elsa is the opposite. Most recently — and this is clearly the fault of Elsa’s parents — she fell off our relatively low-to-the-ground bed after suddenly standing up and sprinting away from my husband before he could grab her. The bruise under her eye over the course of several days turned into a blue/green crescent that caught the eye of a Potrero Hill coffee shop owner who, as a former boxer, offered up raw egg yolk as a tonic for pounded faces that he promised would turn the bruise red in one day and invisible in two.

“Bruises like that — people are going to think you’re not careful,” he said.

You think?

I feel slightly helpless. What can I do to prevent my daughter from repeatedly walloping herself? Confine her to a playpen? Bubble wrap? A football helmet? Strap her into the Ergo carrier during her waking hours? None of these seem particularly good solutions for an active toddler. The day I talked to the former boxer, I cracked an egg and tried to rub it on her cheek while she napped, but she promptly rolled over smearing yellow on her sheets.

Not long after, she slid off her sister’s very-low-to-the-ground IKEA toddler bed, scraping her cheek along the safety rail as she did, adding some bright red to the blue and green bruise. Colorful.